Thank you. This is great. I didn’t have the historical background on this issue but I sensed something was off when I read Henrich. In my review a few years ago I wrote “[G]iven today's antipathy to religion among educated academic types (Henrich's target audience), it is possible that his editorial decision to sidestep the actual religion thing and blame the benefits of Christianity on an accident was actually the best way for Henrich to spread abroad the message of Christianity's societal benefits while also maintaining his academic reputation and make him a bunch of money on book sales.” Whether this was just a pragmatic move or a Straussian way to spread a pro-Christianity story I don’t know, but I suspect Henrich doesn’t fully believe his own explanation.
Ok, but Henrich certainly popularized it for our time. Just from a quick Google search (not claiming expertise in this field), the Goody perspective that you linked to was highly debatable. Shaw and Saller responded to Goody with a sharp critique: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2802181?origin=crossref
As I see it, Henrich selected the weaker side of an existing debate because it served his purpose and ran with it.
Henrich’s focus on cousin marriage is not because it lowers IQ and increases the chance of genetic diseases becoming rampant. Cousin marriage serves to support the complex kin-based social structures prevalent in most societies. People living in such societies grow up and come of age amidst a dense network of familial relationships that provide direction in life and insurance against failure. Family connections may determine a young person’s occupation, and family obligations influence who they employ.
Cousin marriage strengthens this family networks by making both sides of a couple come from the same family. Without cousin marriage, when you child marries they may join the other family rather than stay in yours, reducing the number and strength of family bonds. Planting the idea that cousin marriage is incest no different that brother-sister incest (which many people have an intrinsic aversion to) means family networks loss members every generation, weakening them. It becomes harder to place rising adults in some family occupation and young people may go to work as apprentices with unrelated people, or strike out on their own. Such individuals are social naked in the world with no support structure. Then tend to create communities of like-minded, unrelated persons, to replace these structures.
These can be religious; the 11th and 12th centuries saw strong growth in monastic communities. The could be commercial, some young people went to the rising towns, where, if they survived, they might form associations with others like them for mutual protection and friendship. These associations later developed economic functions to become the medieval guilds. Those with an academic bent might attend university, training to become a lawyer or administrator in the church or state. By the High Middle Ages the discouragement of cousin marriage had done its job, Europeans had developed identities as individuals. The process was irreversible, later removal of cousin marriage bans by protestants had no effect.
You propose that restriction on cousin marriage was part of Indo European culture, and so would be widespread. But on page 238 Henrich reports that exposure to Roman Catholicism explains nearly 75% of the variation in rates of cousin marriage in Italy, France, Turkey, and Spain. He then shows excellent correlation between four dimensions of psychology and cousin marriage. Your Indo European explanation would be expected to give a fairly uniform incidence of cousin marriage through the range when the Indo Europeans went, and similar psychologies. The West would not be different from Central Asia, Turkey, Iran Northern India and elsewhere the Indo Europeans went.
But Henrich goes to great lengths to show that the West IS different. And it’s not even Europe, but only that part of Europe with length exposure to Latin Christianity, as opposed to Greek, or Islam.
>All steppe peoples shared the cousin marriage taboo, which is completely unrelated to Jewish or any Semitic law. We know this because it’s cited all over ... in early law-codes.
This is a way too strong statement if you only support it with two examples and one counterexample. I'm happy to accept this but more evidence is needed. If we look at ancient Germanic or Celtic practices, which should be important for a discussion about WEIRD, I see no cousin marriage taboo.
Great post, yes in many Indian castes / regions not only is cousin-marriage prohibited, you can't even marry someone from your own village. This is a sharp north / south divide, with cousin marriage much more prevalent in South India than in North.
Among North Indian Hindus, cousin marriage is strictly forbidden. Mainstream Hindu Law bans it up to all sharing even one grandparent going back to the 5th generation (3x Great) on the paternal side and up till 3rd generation on the maternal side.
1) Cousin marriage is still a strong taboo for North Indian Hindus, esp for upper castes. It did not get diluted by Dravidian influences.
2) Cousin marriage in England features quite frequently in literature, eg in novels of Jane Austen and Bronte sisters. In Jane Eyre, a Church of England parson proposes to marry his first cousin.
In Pride and Prejudice, another parson proposes to marry Elizabeth Bennett (a rather remote cousin).
Nowhere in these books, is cousin marriage treated as anything out of course.
To me, there are two very interesting points: one simply a wry observation that the more things change, the more they remain the same; and the other is more of a question of what particular factors led to the steppe tradition of no cousin marriages?
The first point is an ironic observation that Gregory I's use of scripture (falsely) to justify social policy is very similar to the 1973's SCOTUS Roe v Wade decision that was an instrument to support social policy that was justified by essentially false notions that there was textual support to be found in the constitution.
Both were arguments from authority (judicial and religious leaders), with an attempt to use an even higher authority for support (constitution and scripture).
Please note that this observation is not an attack on abortion rights but rather as identifying deceptive public policy tools used similarly down the ages.
The second point is to wonder what *specific* forces were present on the steppes that favored the widespread adoption of a prohibition against cousin marriage. I think it's probably a result of the physical environmental conditions that were present, but what exactly those were, and how the ban helped, is not clear.
It would be fun to try to reason this out.
Now diverging, support for cousin marriage, and even sibling or offspring marriage, would seem to me to be favored by bloodline-based power structures seeking to strengthen their positions of relative power within a society. Wealth/assets, and hence power, tend to distill and concentrate. If the families that practice this are sufficiently powerful, they can simply look at the negative genetic consequences as the cost of retaining position/power, and more-or-less discard those who are genetically effective.
This would led to social stratification and likely be favored by elites.
And extending this concept, I wonder if the consequences of functionally questionable off-spring from cousin marriages in a much more marginal, subsistence society, like seasonal herdsmen on the steppes, might be much more dire for the families as a whole. That the consequences of genetic erosion might put greater stress on a marginal subsistence group, either thru attempting to care for these offspring, or more likely, losing the extra manpower to be expected from the healthy offspring of a reproductive union.
Now, this practice of avoiding incestuous marriage has a side effect of tending to resist bloodline power acquisition, and hence social stratification. It also would make finding a suitable mate harder, causing the young males to widen their geographic search, with the consequent results that the culture would tend to spread over a larger geographical area.
But all this is simply my own questionable speculation. Interesting, though...
Well Aryans come from a herding/migratory/rural zone and Semites come from a farming/stationary/urban-ish zone, so there's a big environmental difference there.
I suspect genetic/defects justifications to disfavour cousin marriages were very secondary to concentration of wealth and power justifications. On the Steppe spreading out and diversifying and having many social ties to call on in would be important to long term survival. Meanwhile in the lands of the first kings developing norms that favour keeping wealth concentrated would be favoured by those who have enough concentrated wealth to want to keep.
"On the Steppe spreading out and diversifying and having many social ties to call on in would be important to long term survival. Meanwhile in the lands of the first kings developing norms that favor keeping wealth concentrated would be favoured by those who have enough concentrated wealth to want to keep."
My reading of this is that you're saying that there are positive advantages to first cousin marriages for steppe cultures ("many social ties"), even though the article tells us that steppe cultures prohibited such marriages.
Sorry that wasn't clear. I meant that you have more social ties by your family marrying into more, different, families. As opposed to "stronger family ties" which would, I guess, mean marrying the same family multiple times.
YES. Great post. This is precisely the problem I have with Henrich: he ends up with a very thin sociological picture because he consistently overstates the role of one institutional actor (the Church) to create a just-so story about the evolution of Western values. The cousin marriage question is the essential one because it’s foundational for him, but I found myself particularly frustrated by his discussions of property and market growth from the late medieval period on. He knows this is essential to increasingly individualistic norms, and he can’t either dismiss it or make it purely a function of Christianity, but he still wants to tell a story where the Church is THE dominant force, so there’s a lot of hedging. As someone who absolutely thinks that historical family structure and economic change are intertwined, the whole book ends up feeling like a missed opportunity because he’s so eager to prove his one thesis. It has its own issues, but I really prefer the work that Jan Luiten van Zanden and his team have been doing on the European Marriage Pattern and economic development.
Interesting. Islamic jurists follow Martin Luther's literal thinking: if it is not forbidden by the Quran (or Leviticus) it must therefore be allowed. There are also a couple of hadiths (sayings attributed to Muhammad) about keeping family ties that Muslim jurists have used to justify first-cousin marriage. And, of course, Muhammad's daughter Fatima married her cousin Ali (that fact, by itself, would be considered sufficient for Shiites and a lot of Sunnis).
As a result, cousin marriage in Islamic countries is EXTREMELY high -- close to 40% in countries like Egypt. Birth defects are very common. This has become a big controversy in the UK, where immigration opponents cite large Muslim immigrant families with birth defects as a drain on the NHS.
Thank you. This is great. I didn’t have the historical background on this issue but I sensed something was off when I read Henrich. In my review a few years ago I wrote “[G]iven today's antipathy to religion among educated academic types (Henrich's target audience), it is possible that his editorial decision to sidestep the actual religion thing and blame the benefits of Christianity on an accident was actually the best way for Henrich to spread abroad the message of Christianity's societal benefits while also maintaining his academic reputation and make him a bunch of money on book sales.” Whether this was just a pragmatic move or a Straussian way to spread a pro-Christianity story I don’t know, but I suspect Henrich doesn’t fully believe his own explanation.
Again.
Its not a Heindrich idea: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/development-of-the-family-and-marriage-in-europe/B2090AFDBA7748E625497D2328D30525
Ok, but Henrich certainly popularized it for our time. Just from a quick Google search (not claiming expertise in this field), the Goody perspective that you linked to was highly debatable. Shaw and Saller responded to Goody with a sharp critique: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2802181?origin=crossref
As I see it, Henrich selected the weaker side of an existing debate because it served his purpose and ran with it.
Not really.
Goody never said that romans were endogamous.
Authors like Fukuyama wrote extensibly, and in the exactly same terms, about all those ideas::
https://www.amazon.es/Origins-Political-Order-Prehuman-Revolution/dp/1846682576/ref=asc_df_1846682576/?tag=googshopes-21&linkCode=df0&hvadid=699717042925&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=12657678793141991625&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=m&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=1005479&hvtargid=pla-406163990393&psc=1&mcid=85eafe6dc3543e7c81df628b8d7dda2f&gad_source=1
In the Emmanueld Tood work you can find similar but way more nuanced ideas
The most important points in Heindrich work are not original at all but a common talking point in, many, others authors work.
Even in internet you can find It way before the Heindrich book was published. Or even YouTube: https://youtu.be/H03H73tdh6s?si=f2trU4sIJOttigiC
I mean: It was not a new idea needed of more attention.
(Yes, english is not my first or second language.)
Henrich’s focus on cousin marriage is not because it lowers IQ and increases the chance of genetic diseases becoming rampant. Cousin marriage serves to support the complex kin-based social structures prevalent in most societies. People living in such societies grow up and come of age amidst a dense network of familial relationships that provide direction in life and insurance against failure. Family connections may determine a young person’s occupation, and family obligations influence who they employ.
Cousin marriage strengthens this family networks by making both sides of a couple come from the same family. Without cousin marriage, when you child marries they may join the other family rather than stay in yours, reducing the number and strength of family bonds. Planting the idea that cousin marriage is incest no different that brother-sister incest (which many people have an intrinsic aversion to) means family networks loss members every generation, weakening them. It becomes harder to place rising adults in some family occupation and young people may go to work as apprentices with unrelated people, or strike out on their own. Such individuals are social naked in the world with no support structure. Then tend to create communities of like-minded, unrelated persons, to replace these structures.
These can be religious; the 11th and 12th centuries saw strong growth in monastic communities. The could be commercial, some young people went to the rising towns, where, if they survived, they might form associations with others like them for mutual protection and friendship. These associations later developed economic functions to become the medieval guilds. Those with an academic bent might attend university, training to become a lawyer or administrator in the church or state. By the High Middle Ages the discouragement of cousin marriage had done its job, Europeans had developed identities as individuals. The process was irreversible, later removal of cousin marriage bans by protestants had no effect.
You propose that restriction on cousin marriage was part of Indo European culture, and so would be widespread. But on page 238 Henrich reports that exposure to Roman Catholicism explains nearly 75% of the variation in rates of cousin marriage in Italy, France, Turkey, and Spain. He then shows excellent correlation between four dimensions of psychology and cousin marriage. Your Indo European explanation would be expected to give a fairly uniform incidence of cousin marriage through the range when the Indo Europeans went, and similar psychologies. The West would not be different from Central Asia, Turkey, Iran Northern India and elsewhere the Indo Europeans went.
But Henrich goes to great lengths to show that the West IS different. And it’s not even Europe, but only that part of Europe with length exposure to Latin Christianity, as opposed to Greek, or Islam.
>All steppe peoples shared the cousin marriage taboo, which is completely unrelated to Jewish or any Semitic law. We know this because it’s cited all over ... in early law-codes.
This is a way too strong statement if you only support it with two examples and one counterexample. I'm happy to accept this but more evidence is needed. If we look at ancient Germanic or Celtic practices, which should be important for a discussion about WEIRD, I see no cousin marriage taboo.
Great post, yes in many Indian castes / regions not only is cousin-marriage prohibited, you can't even marry someone from your own village. This is a sharp north / south divide, with cousin marriage much more prevalent in South India than in North.
Among North Indian Hindus, cousin marriage is strictly forbidden. Mainstream Hindu Law bans it up to all sharing even one grandparent going back to the 5th generation (3x Great) on the paternal side and up till 3rd generation on the maternal side.
I would add that
1) Cousin marriage is still a strong taboo for North Indian Hindus, esp for upper castes. It did not get diluted by Dravidian influences.
2) Cousin marriage in England features quite frequently in literature, eg in novels of Jane Austen and Bronte sisters. In Jane Eyre, a Church of England parson proposes to marry his first cousin.
In Pride and Prejudice, another parson proposes to marry Elizabeth Bennett (a rather remote cousin).
Nowhere in these books, is cousin marriage treated as anything out of course.
That's great, Vishal, thanks, very apropos. Do you know of any estimates about the prevalence of cousin marriage in India?
No hard data but
1) Among North Indian upper caste Hindus--close to vanishing
2) North India lower caste Hindus-- At most, it is uncommon
3) Muslims--quite common
4) South Indian Hindus-- aprox 20-25 %
South Indian kinship --- a person can marry a cousin from father's sister side but not father's brother'side
Similarly, it is permitted to marry a cousin from mother's brother's side but not mother's sister side.
This type of cross-kinship marriage norms is, I believe, exists in many scattered societies wordlwide
It´s not a Henrich's idea.
You can read that in other antropologist.
Example: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/development-of-the-family-and-marriage-in-europe/B2090AFDBA7748E625497D2328D30525
Great post
To me, there are two very interesting points: one simply a wry observation that the more things change, the more they remain the same; and the other is more of a question of what particular factors led to the steppe tradition of no cousin marriages?
The first point is an ironic observation that Gregory I's use of scripture (falsely) to justify social policy is very similar to the 1973's SCOTUS Roe v Wade decision that was an instrument to support social policy that was justified by essentially false notions that there was textual support to be found in the constitution.
Both were arguments from authority (judicial and religious leaders), with an attempt to use an even higher authority for support (constitution and scripture).
Please note that this observation is not an attack on abortion rights but rather as identifying deceptive public policy tools used similarly down the ages.
The second point is to wonder what *specific* forces were present on the steppes that favored the widespread adoption of a prohibition against cousin marriage. I think it's probably a result of the physical environmental conditions that were present, but what exactly those were, and how the ban helped, is not clear.
It would be fun to try to reason this out.
Now diverging, support for cousin marriage, and even sibling or offspring marriage, would seem to me to be favored by bloodline-based power structures seeking to strengthen their positions of relative power within a society. Wealth/assets, and hence power, tend to distill and concentrate. If the families that practice this are sufficiently powerful, they can simply look at the negative genetic consequences as the cost of retaining position/power, and more-or-less discard those who are genetically effective.
This would led to social stratification and likely be favored by elites.
And extending this concept, I wonder if the consequences of functionally questionable off-spring from cousin marriages in a much more marginal, subsistence society, like seasonal herdsmen on the steppes, might be much more dire for the families as a whole. That the consequences of genetic erosion might put greater stress on a marginal subsistence group, either thru attempting to care for these offspring, or more likely, losing the extra manpower to be expected from the healthy offspring of a reproductive union.
Now, this practice of avoiding incestuous marriage has a side effect of tending to resist bloodline power acquisition, and hence social stratification. It also would make finding a suitable mate harder, causing the young males to widen their geographic search, with the consequent results that the culture would tend to spread over a larger geographical area.
But all this is simply my own questionable speculation. Interesting, though...
Well Aryans come from a herding/migratory/rural zone and Semites come from a farming/stationary/urban-ish zone, so there's a big environmental difference there.
I suspect genetic/defects justifications to disfavour cousin marriages were very secondary to concentration of wealth and power justifications. On the Steppe spreading out and diversifying and having many social ties to call on in would be important to long term survival. Meanwhile in the lands of the first kings developing norms that favour keeping wealth concentrated would be favoured by those who have enough concentrated wealth to want to keep.
"On the Steppe spreading out and diversifying and having many social ties to call on in would be important to long term survival. Meanwhile in the lands of the first kings developing norms that favor keeping wealth concentrated would be favoured by those who have enough concentrated wealth to want to keep."
My reading of this is that you're saying that there are positive advantages to first cousin marriages for steppe cultures ("many social ties"), even though the article tells us that steppe cultures prohibited such marriages.
Can you clear up any understanding?
Sorry that wasn't clear. I meant that you have more social ties by your family marrying into more, different, families. As opposed to "stronger family ties" which would, I guess, mean marrying the same family multiple times.
Ah. I see now.
Thanks for your patience and for clearing up the statement for me!
YES. Great post. This is precisely the problem I have with Henrich: he ends up with a very thin sociological picture because he consistently overstates the role of one institutional actor (the Church) to create a just-so story about the evolution of Western values. The cousin marriage question is the essential one because it’s foundational for him, but I found myself particularly frustrated by his discussions of property and market growth from the late medieval period on. He knows this is essential to increasingly individualistic norms, and he can’t either dismiss it or make it purely a function of Christianity, but he still wants to tell a story where the Church is THE dominant force, so there’s a lot of hedging. As someone who absolutely thinks that historical family structure and economic change are intertwined, the whole book ends up feeling like a missed opportunity because he’s so eager to prove his one thesis. It has its own issues, but I really prefer the work that Jan Luiten van Zanden and his team have been doing on the European Marriage Pattern and economic development.
Hello, what are the sources? Where is this evidence for all this please?
Unless he's added them since you commented, there seem to be a large number of sources in the text
Interesting. Islamic jurists follow Martin Luther's literal thinking: if it is not forbidden by the Quran (or Leviticus) it must therefore be allowed. There are also a couple of hadiths (sayings attributed to Muhammad) about keeping family ties that Muslim jurists have used to justify first-cousin marriage. And, of course, Muhammad's daughter Fatima married her cousin Ali (that fact, by itself, would be considered sufficient for Shiites and a lot of Sunnis).
As a result, cousin marriage in Islamic countries is EXTREMELY high -- close to 40% in countries like Egypt. Birth defects are very common. This has become a big controversy in the UK, where immigration opponents cite large Muslim immigrant families with birth defects as a drain on the NHS.
He must have missed all the research about the Habsburgs and their numerous birth defects. Including the infamous jaws.